Was rewatching Contact (1997) for the 100th time and the use of Occam's Razor principle in it has always bugged me.
All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one.
That's a bad way to phrase the principle. In the movie they very incorrectly use it to pick the hoax theory over the it-was-real theory.
Better way to phrase it would be "don't add unnecessary complexity". What the principle really says is that if you see a person on the floor bleeding to death and another person standing over them with a bloody knife, don't start theorizing about a third person, some one-armed hitman. There's no evidence to support that.
But in the film there's absolutely evidence to support the it-was-real theory. Occam's Razor says nothing about the complexity of the truth. Special relativity is pretty complex but nevertheless true (sometimes).
And I've seen this definition get abused in other movies in a similar vein. Hollywood :(